A Catastrophic Mutating Event Will Strike the World in 2 Years, Report Says

The following article was obtained from Good Housekeeping.  Story by Tim Newcomb.

• A World Economic Forum report says business leaders believe a “catastrophic cyber event” is coming.
• Cybercrime will grow from a $3 trillion industry in 2015 to a $10.5 trillion industry by 2025, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.
• The unpredictable nature of cybercrime increases threats.

The 2023 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, has filled us with lots of uplifting predictions, like how companies will soon decode our brain waves. The latest warns of a global catastrophic cyber event in the very near future.

“The most striking finding that we’ve found,” WEF managing director Jeremy Jurgens said during a presentation highlighting the WEF Global Security Outlook Report 2023, “is that 93% of cyber leaders, and 86% of cyber business leaders, believe that the geopolitical instability makes a catastrophic cyber event likely in the next two years. This far exceeds anything that we’ve seen in previous surveys.”

Add in the extreme unpredictability of these events—Jurgens cited a cyberattack recently aimed at shutting down Ukranian military abilities that unexpectedly also closed off parts of electricity production across Europe—and the global challenges are only growing.

“This is a global threat,” Jürgen Stock, Secretary-General of Interpol, said during the presentation. “It calls for a global response and enhanced and coordinated action.” He said the increased profits that the multiple bad “actors” reap from cybercrime should encourage world leaders to work together to make it a priority as they face “new sophisticated tools.”

One country that recently saw a massive cyberattack, Albania, is now working with larger allies in warding off the criminals, serving as a laboratory of sorts for folks to realize what is coming.

Edi Rama, Albania’s prime minister, spoke during the presentation, saying that the growth of the cybercrime industry—from $3 trillion in 2015 to an expected $10.5 trillion in 2025, Rama says during the presentation—means that if cybercrime was a state, it would be the third largest global economy after the U.S. and China.

That means the crime coming could truly be catastrophic.

Rama cited the global response to COVID-19 and said a cyberattack could be much more substantial:

“Let’s imagine an exponential multitude of viruses that mutate everyday exponentially while not threatening our body, but the bodies we live in, our organizations, our countries, our system, then, you know, it could be just apocalypse. It’s about viruses that can not only block our way of living, but can control it and deviate it.”

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"They'll besiege all your cities until your high and fortified walls in which you have trusted collapse throughout the land. Indeed, they will besiege all your cities, which the LORD your God gave you." ~ Deuteronomy 28:52